Birds Knit My Ribs Together

what if / I actually - am - a bird / my cupped hands / opening to release me... Phil Barnett's relationship with birds is so close that his poetry blurs the distinctions between himself and the birds - a kind of ornimorphology where rather than giving the birds human characteristics, the reverse happens, and he imagines himself as a bird. Phil Barnett is a photographer, writer, musician, artist and naturalist, who has a passion for the birds that kept him company through a long hard illness. His photography and poetry have quite a following on social media, which is where we found him, on The Daily Haiku. His skill as a photographer leads to an acute visual sensibility, and his slow recovery moves from a tick sheet his mother had to fill in for him, to extraordinary poetry - full of wit and wonder and spectacular language.

A decade long stretch of illness largely confined Phil Barnett to a living room. His patch was the view through the window. He had swapped the people, job, relationships and fully working body of his previous life, for a garden full of birds. It was made bearable by his fascination with all things avian. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that he spent 10 years looking out of a window. He recorded and documented everything, producing a website. Although still affected by illness Phils daily walks take him around an area of fairly ordinary countryside in South Lancashire, producing both poetry and photography that is anything but ordinary.